Slowly along came the line of wagons, and the prairie breeze brought us, in sound, faint and far between, the driver's invocations to their mules.
Matthew C. Field, journalist
1839
From 1821 until the late 1860s the Santa Fe Trail ran about two hundred yards south of here. If you were standing here while traveling west on the "road to Santa Fe" in the 1860s, your wagon caravan left Independence, Missouri, about three weeks ago. The Hispanic and Anglo drivers are keeping the oxen and mules moving at a steady pace of one and one-half miles an hour. You are almost at the halfway point of your 780 mile journey.
Yesterday, you camped at Walnut Creek crossing, sixteen miles back up the road. Fort Larned is west-southwest of here some fourteen miles away.
Today the vehicles you see on US 56 Highway could have been in Independence only six hours ago.
Listen to the muffled roar of the trucks, hauling goods both east and west. Do these modern freighters realize they are following a major commercial highway that has been in existence for at least 175 years?
John Bingham's 1848 Table of Distances on the Kansas Section of the Santa Fe Trail
[see photograph]
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